Detecting heavy charged Higgs bosons at the LHC with triple b-tagging

Abstract

We investigate the charged Higgs boson signal at the LHC using its dominant production and decay modes with triple b-tagging, i.e. $tH^- \to t\bar tb \to b\bar bb W^+ W^-$, followed by leptonic decay of one W and hadronic decay of the other. We consider the continuum background from the associated production of $t\bar t$ with a b- or a light quark or gluon jet, which can be mis-tagged as b-jet. We reconstruct the top quark masses to identify the 3rd b-jet accompanying the $t\bar t$ pair, and use its p_T distribution to distinguish the signal from the background. Combining this with the reconstruction of the $H^\pm$ mass gives a viable signature over two interesting regions of the parameter space - i.e. $\tan\beta \sim 1$ and $\sim m_t/m_b$.